From what I have read about trauma recovery, the process can take a lifetime. The damage done over decades cannot be overwritten in a few years. I’m looking to the future with cautious hope. While a new year may not be a magical reset, I am reflecting on my priorities. I want to improve my […]
Category: Psychology and mental illness
Therapeutic Creativity
Today to procrastinate on writing my daily blog post, I’m updating my page about the themes I’ll be covering in my memoir. People online have been asking if I’m still writing it, and the short answer is I’m working on it very very slowly. The reason for this is that I’m quite young and haven’t […]
Public Gaslighting
Abusers don’t like being held accountable for their actions. One of the best ways to keep an abuser from holding power is to expose their true nature.
Slow Progress
When you report symptoms of depression and anxiety, the doctors give you a chart to fill out. Rating on a scale of frequency, it asks questions like how often you feel like you’d be better off dead, or take little interest in doing things. Though I caved to trying psychiatric medications years ago, they still […]
Art Worth Making
“Don’t use your memoir to air old grievances and to settle old scores; get rid of that anger somewhere else. The memoirs that we do remember from the 1990s are the ones that were written with love and forgiveness…although the childhoods they describe were painful, the writers are as hard on their younger selves as […]
Living with Existential Depression
People have been asking how I’m doing, and I answer that it’s all the same as it was months ago. I’m still fighting the monster of depression, I’m still trying to find meds that work for me, I’m still struggling to find my way back to my art. There’s not much to report when it […]
Winter Freeze
“When people are compulsively and constantly pulled back into the past, to the last time they felt intense involvement and deep emotions, they suffer from a failure of the imagination, a loss of the mental flexibility. Without imagination there is no hope, no chance to envision a better future, no place to go, no goal […]
The Devastation of Lost Faith
“I lay in a bed of resistance Chained to either side I really wish I could, reset, rewind Someone has clawed out my eyes I don’t know what they told you But this place is not what you think Living inside a hole, they put me underground Where they could never find me unless they […]
Dear Anxiety
“Trapped in a cold white room I want to know, who’ll be there when you snuff the wick? I won’t reflect the same as you I want the proof you’ll promise to let ’em down quick. I never want to see clear at all There’s nothing that could be there now Pull out your teeth […]
When God Spoke to Me
“Descartes invoked God – in this case, a literal deus ex machina – to save himself…When people run up against something inexplicable, transcendent, and, most of all, ineffable, they often call it ‘God,’ as if that were some sort of explanation.” –Barbara Ehrenreich “If you withhold information from your children because you would rather them […]